March 4 (Bloomberg) -- Rebekah Brooks told a London court
that News Corp. Chairman Rupert Murdoch asked her not to resign
from her post running the company’s U.K. newspaper unit at the
height of the phone-hacking scandal in July 2011.

Brooks said that she tendered her resignation to Murdoch
days after the disclosure that reporters had listened to
messages on the phone of a murdered schoolgirl. Brooks, who
insisted upon stepping down, said the meeting with Murdoch was
part of a frantic week dealing with the fallout of what became a
global media scandal.

Brooks, 45, is one of seven people standing trial on
charges related to phone hacking and bribing public officials at
the New York-based company’s U.K. newspapers. Murdoch closed the
weekly News of the World in 2011 and dropped a 7.8 billion-pound
($13 billion) offer for British Sky Broadcasting Group Plc in a
bid to end the scandal.

“It really was now time with the closure of the News of
the World. I felt that it was probably the right thing to do,”
she said today. “Should have done it,” even though earlier she
“didn’t do it. Asked not to do it.”

Brooks, who edited the newspaper from 2000 to 2003, said
that she didn’t know that a private investigator at the tabloid
was directed to listen to the voice-mail messages on the phone
of 13-year-old Milly Dowler, who was found murdered in 2002.

“First of all I didn’t believe it,” Brooks said of
learning of the hacking allegations while she was at a fertility
clinic in July 2011.

Fury Building

Earlier in the trial, Brooks said that efforts to have a
child through fertility treatments culminated with the surrogate
birth of her daughter. She has pleaded not guilty to all the
charges against her and today denied any knowledge of a plot to
hide evidence from police at the height of the scandal.

The Dowler news reignited the phone-hacking scandal that
had been in and out of the headlines since 2006.

“When it rains,” it pours, Piers Morgan, a former editor
of a rival tabloid who was then the host of a CNN news program,
said in a text message to Brooks. “Lots of fury building on the
Internet.”

Former U.K. Prime Minister Tony Blair sent her a message of
support.

“Let me know if there is anything I can do to help you
with,” Blair said. “Thinking of you. I have been through
things like this before.” Earlier in the trial, the jury was
shown a memo by Brooks in which she said Blair offered to be an
unofficial adviser to the company during the scandal.

BSkyB Bid

Brooks said today that after learning about the Dowler
hacking, she was concerned that the publicity would hurt the
company’s bid for the BSkyB shares it didn’t already own.

A key regulatory ruling in July 2011 on News Corp.’s offer
for BSkyB was expected days after the news about Milly Dowler
became a national scandal. Brooks said she was worried about how
the publicity, which dominated newspaper headlines worldwide,
would affect the BSkyB deal.

News Corp. executives had considered closing the News of
the World to save the BSkyB bid weeks earlier because of
increased scrutiny of hacking amid a police probe and a number
of civil lawsuits.

“Is the brand too toxic for itself or the company? I
believe it is,” Simon Greenberg, a News Corp. executive who
would later join the company’s management and standards
committee that worked with the police probes, said in a June
2011 e-mail shown to the jury yesterday. “Unparalleled moments
need unparalleled action.”

Resignation

Brooks said she considered stepping down from her post
running the company’s U.K. unit as far back as April 2011
because of the phone-hacking allegations. Following the Dowler
news, she said she no longer had any choice and was told she had
to wait for a face-to-face meeting with Murdoch to tender her
resignation.

Senior executives decided Brooks should resign on July 14,
2011, before she appeared before lawmakers the following week,
she said. On the day Brooks resigned she was escorted from the
company’s London headquarters.

Andy Coulson, another defendant who was also a former
editor of the News of the World, resigned from his job as a
media adviser to Prime Minister David Cameron in January 2011
following a “discreet” meeting with Brooks to discuss
information the company had uncovered about hacking at the
tabloid, Brooks testified yesterday.

Coulson has pleaded not guilty to charges of phone hacking
and bribery in the case.

Arrest

Brooks was arrested for the first time on July 17, 2011, as
she arrived at a police station. “As I got out of the car the
police officer arrested me there and then,” Brooks said. She
spent 12 1/2 hours in custody, she said.

She then returned to her Oxfordshire home to find her
husband, Charlie, in a “state” due to the amount of red wine
he had drunk.

“He was three sheets to the wind,” she said.

She repeatedly denied knowing anything about any plot to
hide computers and files following her arrest.

Brooks said she “lost it” when her husband later told her
that there had been a “mix-up” and he had lost his “rather
large porn collection” and there was a chance that the police
would now arrest him.

“It was just the final straw in what had been a quite
cataclysmic few days,” Brooks said.

Brooks’s husband, her former assistant Cheryl Carter, and
the U.K. unit’s former head of security, Mark Hanna, face
charges of conspiring to pervert the course of justice.